Locating the garage and inter-modal facility just outside the Garden walls preserves the valuable landscape of an urban Botanical Garden and extends the Garden into the community. The new structure transforms a previously decaying industrial “Brownfield” site into a green building. This new facility is strategically located next to a busy commuter railroad line and in walking distance to a new entrance at the Garden.
Responsibility: Working with Desman Associates, Architects of Record and parking garage specialist, Ennead Architects designed and oversaw the project through design, preparation of documents and through completion of construction. Damyanti’s role in the project was to participate in design and technical issues as well as management of the project in the Ennead team.
The dominant feature of the facility is its distinctive exterior façade, which creates a “vertical garden” on all four sides of the building reducing air pollution around the garage. A series of monumental forked elements, symbolic of a simple branch structure, envelop the entire building to form an overall enclosure and vertical trellised landscape, adding texture and greenery to the dense urban environment. Interstices between the forked elements are covered with a Greenscreen® wire trellis, planted with a variety of flowering vines with seasonal blooms.
Punctuated by glass circulation towers at each corner containing vertical circulation, the building glows at night. Exterior accent lighting illuminates the façade’s rhythm facing the railroad and highlights the vehicular entries. Roof top array of photovoltaic solar panels power the façade lighting. On the garage’s interior, the design takes advantage of a geometric shift in the site to create a slender light shaft that brings natural light into the interior. The materials of the garage are – precast concrete and channel glass with a metal trellis infill. Precast with recycled stone and fly ash was sourced from a facility within 2 hours drive from the Bronx. Channel glass contains a high percentage of post- industrial recycled content.
The facility has been designed with the goal to achieve a LEED Silver Equivalent.
